How Can I Monetize My Blog If I am Going It Alone?

by Steve Remington

One of the key reasons people start blogs is to make some money doing it. If you aren’t joining a blog Network like Skinny Moose Media then you are going to have to learn how to monetize your blog and make the money yourself. This takes a lot of extra effort than simply writing.

But let’s not put the cart before the horse. What a person needs to do first is put content on their blog each day that carries some weight. Good keyword rich text with links to highly resourceful sites will help get your blog off the ground. Now it is time to start making money from it. Usually blogs don’t start making money until 6 months into it at bare minimum. Most take at least a year. And most don’t want to hear that.

But here are the basic steps you can take to earn some money from your blog:

Adsense
Google Adsense seems to be the very first step. You can place a code in your template and even in your posts which will display ads that Google presents for you. How do they determine which ads to place on your page? When someone lands on your site, Adsense reads all the text on your page and will find ads to match the text. In most cases they are very targeted but sometimes the ads are a bit off. For instance if your site is about hunting you may see an ad appear that says “Are you hunting for a career”. It is the wrong type of hunting but I would say Google presents relative ads 80% of the time.

You also get paid per click and some ads will pay you based on impressions. You can’t really get rich from Adsense unless you own a website that sees millions of hits per day.

Banners
Banner ads are probably going to be the most highly targeted type of advertising and will probably bring you the most revenue. Allow other businesses to place banners on your blog. You can charge them based on a length of time or based on traffic to your blog. If you can get a business to run a banner ad for six months then you are beginning to really monetize monthly… and different from Adsense where the revenue can really fluctuate month to month.

Content Links
Content Links advertising works by using programs like Kontera which solely provide in-text advertising. How it works is they will provide the links by the advertisers for you. Then when your readers hover over certain key words a pop-up flash bar appears. It shows a screenshot of their website and if a visitor clicks on that flash ad you will get a percentage of each click. It can be anywhere between 10 cents to several dollars per click. All this happens automatically, so once you are set up all you do is publish articles and Kontera will find keyword in your posts to use.

I have seen several sites that use this method. It can make you some good money if you have a very active blog with several thousand unique visitors each week.

In Post
Advertising within your text (blog posts) is a fairly new form of advertising such as LinkXL. As more and more advertisers hear about this option the more appealing it becomes. Why? There are a few things happening here. One, once you place their link and mention them in a blog post, that post will always be there. It might not be on the home page, but for some of us who have been blogging for a long time know that older posts can be found. Always remember that just because a post is archived doesn’t mean it doesn’t get found and read. An in text ad will always be there with the life of that post, and the potential to be found later on is likely. With banner ads once their time is up and you pull the ad, it is removed entirely from your blog. This is also different from Content Links as you are controlling what appears in your posts 100% of the time.

Reviews
Reviews are an excellent way to monetize your blog. Just like In Post advertising their links and information will remain on your blog indefinitely. Reviews are better for the advertiser than the In Post option as typically the entire blog post is dedicated to a business’s product or service. For businesses to allow you to review your product may take some trust but ensure them you will be providing them with advertising in the form of text. Reviews are also a great way to get content on your blog when you may have been struggling for ideas. Now you have killed two birds with one stone by monetizing and providing content for readers.

Text Links
Text Links is basically selling a spot in the sidebar of your blog for people to place links, such as the service of Text Link Ads. This is usually low priced. You can sell a spot for $10-$20 per month. We all know that getting our links out there will help drive up traffic and Google page rank. That is why people are always trying to trade links. Well why not sell a spot? There are people who say that Google is now penalizing blogs with “link farms” also known as selling links.

Tech Crunch had this to say back at the end of 2007:

A major Google page rank update has punished large scale blog link farms and similar sites indulging in heavy cross linking by dramatically cutting their Google page rank scores.

There is some suggestion that the changes may be related to the sale of text link ads, but at this stage this is not backed by evidence, and a range of sites I checked that are selling text link ads were showing no change in page rank.

The only clear change appears to be among large scale blog networks and similar link farms, where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links. Previously such behavior has been rewarded by Google with high page rank, although it would now appear that this loop hole may now be shut. Read more…

Now, I am not saying Google is declaring jihad, but if this is the case then blogrolls should be removed. Whether you sell links or place them on your blog for free, I can’t see where Google and other search engines would know. But make sure to do research on it and determine if it is the right thing for you.

And as a Conclusion
Make sure to do research on no matter which avenues you choose. There are many ways to make a little money on the Internet. The one thing I have learned in the last few years is don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t just use one or two forms of monetizing your blog and try to get rich off it. You will die an old man (or lady) with high stress levels seeing your revenue increase $5 more each month. You bang out on your calculator figures of becoming a six figure blogger if you increase at the same rate over the next 152 years.

Learn to be diverse and don’t be afraid to try new methods…